PLEA TO THE PRESIDENT TVA UNDER FIRE
Plea to the President THE MONTH that followed our cheerless reflections, in the March issue, on the crisis in the Middle East and the general paralysis of the United Nations in other tension areas...
...vide in economic aid...
...The liquidation of foreign bases and the withdrawal of foreign troops from the territory of [these] countries . . . "5...
...The wayward waters of the Tennessee were harnessed to serve the people of the Valley in many ways...
...Harry A. Curtis, former dean of the engineering school of the University of Missouri, as a member of the three-man board expires next month...
...Assembly's resolutions on Cyprus, Algeria, and Kashmir, which were adopted without a dissenting vote...
...It pledges the United States to commit its military forces—i.e., go to war—if the President should so decide, against any Communist aggressor in the Middle East whenever a victim requests help, and it authorizes the President to spend up to $200,000,000 of previously appropriated funds for special projects to strengthen our friends in the Middle East militarily and economically...
...as an affirmative force for mediation and helped reopen the possibility— however uncertain—of a new start in Arab-Israeli negotiations...
...On the contrary, it carries the potential for boundless mischief in deepening the Cold War, multiplying tensions, and intensifying the arms race...
...Such an embargo," Bowles emphasized, "would check the future flow of Soviet arms to Egypt, Syria, and Afghanistan...
...General Vogel has knifed the TVA program he directs on every possible occasion...
...The United States promptly began to ship millions of dollars worth of armaments to that country...
...It was accompanied by the usual diatribes against the United States and contained some proposals which were obviously included for bargaining purposes, but the Soviet plan, on the whole, made a great deal of sense to us...
...TVA under Fire ONE of the finest fruits of the New Deal was the program of the Tennessee Valley Authority...
...There was nothing at all in his new, record-breaking budget for the program this year...
...The general's testimony before the Committee convinced Senate friends of TVA that he was indeed a supporter of the agency's work—that is, all but one...
...But here, just as certainly, is the basis for discussion and negotiation which might lead to a decisive relaxation of tensions and create both the climate and conditions for a long-run settlement...
...TVA programs for navigation, flood control, forestry, agriculture, mineral development, and recreation are part of its unified approach to the problems of the whole region drained by the River and its tributaries...
...The Louisville Courier-Journal summed it up best in a recent editorial when it said: "General Vogel . . . has worked consistently with the enemies of TVA to cripple and restrict TVA operations, to discontinue TVA regional services, to limit its area of service, and to restrict its ability to finance its own power expansion...
...It would relieve Israel of the terrible pressures which led her last fall to risk a 'preventive war.' In return for these very substantial gains we would forego arms shipments into Pakistan, Iran, and Iraq...
...The hope for peaceful settlements, so long lost under the avalanche of sullen words and stubborn emotions, bloomed again in mid-March—a frail plant, to be sure, but alive with promise...
...His Administration sponsored the notorious Dixon-Yates steam plant deal, which it was ultimately obliged to abandon in the face of the shocking revelations uncovered by Congressional investigators...
...But even more disturbing for the future of TVA is the prospect that its managing board could soon be dominated by a majority actually opposed to TVA and all it stands for...
...Certainly it would represent a resort to the shabbiest kind of sabotage...
...President Eisenhower can serve the cause of peace, to which he seems genuinely dedicated, by breaking away from the Dulles emphasis on military alliances, by reconsidering his rejection of the Soviet overture, and by affirmatively exercising American leadership in the pursuit of negotiated settlements of the kind proposed by Bowles and Reuss for Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia...
...Curtis and Raymond R. Paty, have been staunch friends of the TVA concept...
...More recently, however, the attack has been less direct and far more insidious...
...But if he has come to understand the real significance and success of TVA—as a pilot plant to show how men can develop their resources by democratic means for the benefit of all the people —he will appoint a man who genuinely believes in the TVA idea and thus keep intact a board majority dedicated to the advancement of the program it was appointed to administer...
...The long-run hope of these short-run compromises lies, of course, in the use to which the United Nations and the governments involved put the time they have borrowed...
...In our February issue we suggested that the only hopeful prospect for peace in the Middle East would be a negotiated agreement between the Soviets and ourselves to end the arms race and neutralize that area by 1) refusing to ship arms to any nation, 2) joining in demanding bona fide negotiations between Israel and Egypt, and 3) exercising leadership and providing assistance for a region-wide program of social and economic rehabilitation...
...These are the six points: "1...
...Again the Kremlin responded with alacrity...
...Much of the attack has come, understandably, from the private utilities which have spent a considerable fortune in a futile effort to discredit the program...
...Assistance in the economic development of countries of the Near and Middle East, without putting forward any political, military, or other conditions incompatible with the dignity and sovereignty of these countries...
...Red armaments were shipped to Afghanistan in considerable quantity...
...Moreover, the Soviets offered, and the Afghans accepted, an economic assistance loan of $100,000,000 on easy terms...
...Eisenhower spoke evasively of proposing later on that TVA be authorized to spend $30,000,000 for this urgently needed work.—if and when Congress approves legislation that would authorize TVA to finance its own power generation by issuing revenue bonds...
...The foundation of our current policy is to arm and aid any nation, whatever its position on anything or everything else, if it will join with us in military alliance, defensive to be sure, against the Soviet Union and its Communist camp...
...That is why President Eisenhower's selection of a successor to Dr...
...Appointed at the behest of the President's private power-minded advisers, the chairman of the board has played the game the way the utility crowd wants it played...
...Afghanistan, fearful and suspicious of the growing military might of her neighbor, turned to the Soviet Union for help...
...Arms embargoes, neutralization of whole areas like Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent, and regional economic development do not add up to any panacea for all the world's problems...
...Chester Bowles, who served with unparalleled distinction as our ambassador to India, reported from that country recently that "the developing power of the American-equipped Pakistan Army and Air Force has frightened the Indians into spending $100,000,000 of their dwindling foreign exchange to purchase comparable weapons...
...Bowles, now completing a journey through many of the tension areas of the world, reports his grave concern over the precious ground we are losing both in the struggle against communism and the struggle for peace as the result of "our narrow military focus...
...Pakistan joined the alliance, just as she did the Bagdad Pact...
...The appointment of another Vogel could wreck the TVA...
...Inevitably, the TVA has been under relentless fire from the day it was born 24 years ago...
...When he took his oath of office, he swore that he did "believe in TVA...
...Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon was troubled...
...From 1950 to 1955, for example, two organizations alone, the National Association of Electric Companies and the Electric Companies Advertising Program, devoted more than $8,000,000 to a campaign designed to distort the record of TVA and other federal resource development programs...
...There is a great danger in this appointment," he said, "that we will bring to the Tennessee Valley the approach of the Army engineers...
...Curtis takes on such decisive proportions...
...all of them, however, borrowed time for a fresh look at the sources of strife and for a resumption of negotiations...
...The term of Dr...
...Secretary of State Dulles inadvertently invited them in a year or so ago when he sought to band the nations of the area into an anti-Soviet alliance which has come to be known as the Bagdad Pact...
...But they do hold out the real prospect of putting down roots for peaceful settlement in the areas where tension is greatest...
...Much the same costly consequence has resulted from another of Mr...
...Meanwhile, TVA is powerless to move forward to meet the expanding power needs of the Valley...
...There are other, equally costly consequences resulting from our obsessive over-emphasis of anti-Soviet military alliances...
...and the Western Powers continue to maneuver for power and position there and continue to pour arms into the arsenals of their allies in that area...
...Their votes have prevented General Vogel from running amuck more destructively than he has...
...If President Eisenhower makes the same kind of appointment he did when he had his first opportunity to fill a TVA vacancy, the majority of the board will be composed of members bent on reducing if not paralyzing the operations of the TVA program...
...There isn't a line or word in the Doctrine that could help the President resolve any of the currently contested issues in the Middle East...
...Egypt turned, inevitably, to the Soviet Union for military aid...
...The President's first and only appointment to the board thus far came when he appointed General Herbert D. Vogel, an Army engineer, as chairman...
...The self-defeating character of this policy is graphically illustrated by developments in two of the most strategic areas in the world—the Middle East and the Asian lands of India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan...
...Dulles' one-track approach to the challenge of Soviet ambition—the establishment of even more anti-Communist military alliances—thus achieved precisely the reverse result, for it opened the locked door to the Middle East to Russian penetration...
...Fortunately, the other two members of the Board, Dr...
...Non-interference in the internal affairs of the countries of the Near and Middle East...
...None of the U.N...
...We of The Progressive remain convinced that the crisis in the Middle East will continue, perhaps even in greater degree, so long as the U.S.S.R...
...Eisenhower has his Doctrine now...
...The Bowles approach, like our own, and like the course for Europe charted by Representative Henry S. Reuss in his article on Page 6 of this issue of The Progressive, might perhaps be dismissed as ivory-tower idealism, unattainable in a world faced with the challenge of expanding communism, were it not for the fact that the Soviet Union has itself proposed a course of this character...
...The way out, he is convinced after observing developments firsthand and conferring with countless officials in many key nations, is a negotiated agreement between the West and the Soviet Union to refrain from shipping arms to any of the countries in both the Middle East and the India-Pakistan-Afghanistan region...
...For it comes from within, and it comes, not as a forthright debate on the merits, but as a sniping, sabotaging scheme to weaken TVA by depriving it of urgently needed funds and cripple it with management hostile to the whole concept of the TVA program...
...Today 50 per cent of Afghanistan's trade is with the Soviet Union...
...The Kremlin responded with understandable enthusiasm...
...Eisenhower wants TVA dismantled, he ought to say so and fight it out on that line...
...all of them provided time for tempers to cool and minds to work...
...If the President uses much of the $200,000,000 fund to supply arms to our friends in Iran and Iraq, there is nothing tq prevent the Soviets from doing exactly the same—and more—for her friends in Egypt and Syria...
...Israel's decision to relinquish to the U.N...
...None of them settled anything...
...Iraq joined the alliance, but her foe, Egypt, declined...
...The production of cheap power alone has achieved miracles in building the region's economy and improving the standard of living of the people who live in the Valley...
...her military hold on the Gaza Strip and the Gulf of Aqaba—on "assumptions" of American support of her territorial integrity and her right to freedom of navigation—resolved none of the issues in the Middle East, but it revived the moral authority of the U.N...
...Here, in the basin of a great but untamed river, democratic planners and technical craftsmen, working under a mandate from the national government, built a regionally integrated program that has become one of the wonders of the world...
...The preservation of peace in the Near and Middle East by settling questions at issue exclusively by peaceful means...
...Instead, Mr...
...We refused on the ground that she would not join the Bagdad Pact...
...Two weeks later the Kremlin came forward with a six-point program for the Middle East which embodied most of our proposals...
...Soon Russian arms were pouring into Egypt, and Syria too, and Soviet technicians, advisers, and propagandists were swarming through the Middle East...
...The TVA Act requires that members of the board believe in the wisdom and feasibility of the program...
...When he appeared before the Senate Public Works Committee, General Vogel testified to his devotion to the concept and goals of TVA...
...Respect for the sovereignty and independence of these countries...
...Here, certainly, is no cure-all for the ills of one of the sickest regions on earth...
...There is no substitute for enthusiastic convictions in favor af a program that you are going to administer...
...This would involve, of course, far-reaching revision of the very basis of our present approach to the crises of our time...
...We began to arm Iraq...
...Now that he has his Doctrine— now that he has shown the world how overwhelmingly Congress supports his resistance to Communist penetration in the Middle East—we would plead with the President for a truly agonizing reappraisal of our recent policies and an objective evaluation of the trouble they have brewed for us, with the view to reconsidering his rejection of the six-point Soviet program...
...Yet less than 24 hours after the Soviets unveiled their program, the White House dismissed it as an obviously insincere propaganda device whose principal purpose was to make trouble for the Eisenhower Doctrine then pending before Congress...
...Egypt asked for arms too...
...We noted in our editorial that the great barrier to such a course might be a truculent unwillingness by the Soviets to enter into such an agreement...
...Much the same can be said of the U.N...
...today there are 500 Soviet technicians, diplomats, military experts, and propagandists operating in Afghanistan—a country in which the Communists had made little or no headway until the United States paved the way by arming Pakistan...
...This strikes us as one of the most ironic of all the results of our contradictory and self-defeating foreign policy: We pour millions of dollars into India for economic aid, in thfc hope that she will be able to build a' sound, democratic society and stand as a successful symbol and bulwark against communism in Asia, and we then proceed, by arming hostile, neighboring Pakistan, to require India to weaken her economy by spending twice as much on arms as we pro...
...Dulles' adventures in the building of anti-Soviet military alliances—the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, known as SEATO...
...This meant a diversion of badly needed economic development projects twice the sum the United States gave India in economic assistance in 1956...
...Senator Morse's forebodings proved all too prophetic...
...Plea to the President THE MONTH that followed our cheerless reflections, in the March issue, on the crisis in the Middle East and the general paralysis of the United Nations in other tension areas of the world has brought a measurably brighter prospect...
...decisions of recent weeks came within hailing distance of meeting head-on the conflicts with which they were meant to deal...
...If Mr...
...But there is much more to TVA than public power at reasonable rates...
...Thus TVA has found itself not only attacked from without but sabotaged from within...
...Joint refusal to supply arms to [these] countries . . . "6...
...President Eisenhower, who has referred to TVA in kindly terms in campaign speeches, showed his real feelings one day when he denounced the program as "creeping socialism...
...Only by a bold move of this kind can we put a stop to the arms race between the neighbors of the strategic sub-continent, as well as of the Middle East, and encourage them all to apply their energy and resources to their greatest need, the elimination of poverty, disease, and ignorance among their people...
...During the past two sessions of Congress the Chief Executive has refused to recommend the funds desperately required by the agency for its new power-generation construction...
...Refusal to undertake any attempts to draw these countries into military alignments with the participation of the great powers...
...For centuries Czarist Russia, and more recently, Communist Russia, sought persistently but unsuccessfully to gain a foothold in the Middle East...
Vol. 21 • April 1957 • No. 4
